Latoya Lucas was riding in a Humvee in 2003 when a rocket-propelled grenade hit it head on. She survived, but the injuries forced her out of the Army years before she could reach 20 years of service. Every December since, the Purple Heart recipient has opened her year-end pay statement and seen the same line: a chunk of her retirement pay missing, taken dollar for dollar because she also receives VA disability compensation.
She’s one of nearly 59,000 veterans in that exact position right now, and the hit is real money. The Congressional Budget Office calculates that these combat-injured retirees lose an average of $2,300 a month in retirement pay, while the special payment meant to make up for it covers only about $850. A bill moving through Congress right now would close that difference completely, putting nearly $17,400 more a year into these veterans’ pockets, and after more than a decade of going nowhere, it just forced its way onto the House floor.
The legislation is called the Major Richard Star Act, and in September a rare procedural maneuver finally pried it loose from committee. A floor vote isn’t expected until November, and the road from there to the president’s desk is still far from settled.
The wounded warrior tax draining their retirement pay
Under current law, a service member who’s medically retired because of a disability is sorted into what the Pentagon calls a Chapter 61 retirement. If that veteran also qualifies for VA disability compensation, which most severely injured veterans do, their military retirement pay gets cut by the same amount, dollar for dollar. Troops who complete a full 20 years of service and carry a VA disability rating of 50% or higher are exempt from that offset. Troops forced out earlier, including many whose careers ended because of a combat wound, are not.
A narrower program called Combat-Related Special Compensation was created to soften that loss for the combat-injured specifically, but it only restores part of what’s taken. As of last September, the Pentagon was paying this special compensation to nearly 59,000 Chapter 61 retirees, and for most of them, the replacement payment fell well short of what they’d lost. Veterans with less combat-related disability but more than 20 years of service face a version of the same problem, capped by a rule that can trim hundreds of dollars a month off what they’d otherwise collect.
What the Major Richard Star Act would actually change
The bill is named for Army Maj. Richard Star, an engineering officer whose lung cancer was tied to burn pit exposure in Iraq and Afghanistan. He died in 2021 at age 51, after years spent lobbying Congress to close this offset for veterans like him.
House Resolution 2102 and its Senate companion, S. 1032, would eliminate the dollar-for-dollar reduction for Chapter 61 retirees with combat-related disabilities, regardless of how many years they served. It would also drop the 20-year service requirement from the broader concurrent receipt program and remove the cap that currently limits payments to some 20-year retirees. Taken together, the Congressional Budget Office projects the changes would cost $78 billion over the 2026 through 2036 budget window, a price tag that has been the single biggest obstacle to passage.
The bill has 340 cosponsors in the House, comfortably more than enough to pass if it reaches a vote, with support that crosses party lines in a Congress that agrees on very little else.
The bill just cleared a rare hurdle in the House
On September 16, House Democrats collected the final signature on a discharge petition that reached the 218 signatures needed to force a floor vote, a maneuver that bypasses House leadership and is rarely successful. Every House Democrat signed, and five Republicans eventually broke with their own party to join them. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina provided the deciding signature, saying combat-injured veterans had waited long enough and it was time for Congress to vote.
The other four Republicans who signed over the summer were Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida. Their signatures came after years of pressure from groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which has made the bill a top legislative priority for most of the decade.
The actual floor vote isn’t expected until November, once the House returns from a break ahead of the midterm elections. Once a discharge petition clears its threshold, any signer can call for the vote, so the timing now hinges on when House leadership schedules it rather than whether it happens at all.
Why a Senate Republican keeps blocking a vote
Clearing the House is only half the fight. In the Senate, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has tried to bring the bill up for an immediate vote by unanimous consent at least six separate times, and Rand Paul of Kentucky has objected every single time. Paul’s objection has little to do with whether combat-injured veterans have earned the money. He’s pointed instead to the nation’s debt, which he’s said is approaching $40 trillion, and insisted any new spending needs an offset elsewhere in the budget.
That insistence is what pushed House Republicans to fold the Major Richard Star Act into a much larger package called the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, which bundles 62 separate veterans bills into one and pays for part of the new spending by cutting disability ratings for sleep apnea and tinnitus on future claims. Disabled American Veterans called that funding method a “clear and present danger” to the entire disability system, and House leadership pulled the bill before a floor vote in July after the backlash. The standalone Major Richard Star Act, now freed by the discharge petition, sidesteps that funding fight entirely. It still has to survive the Senate.
What combat-injured veterans can do right now
None of this changes anyone’s pay until Congress votes, and even then a Senate path still isn’t guaranteed. Veterans don’t have to wait on Congress to find out where they currently stand, though.
Anyone who was medically retired with a combat-related disability and is already collecting VA compensation, but isn’t yet receiving Combat-Related Special Compensation, can apply directly through their branch of service using DD Form 2860. The application isn’t automatic, and gathering the required combat documentation can take time, which is exactly why veterans’ organizations recommend starting now rather than waiting on a law that would apply to the same underlying claim regardless.
Groups such as Disabled American Veterans offer free claims assistance for exactly this kind of paperwork, and have pushed hardest for the bill’s passage. Veterans who’d rather track the legislation itself than wait for the next headline can follow H.R. 2102’s status directly on Congress’s own site.
Congress has let this fix die in committee for more than a decade. Whether this is finally the year it survives a floor vote in both chambers won’t be clear until November, at the earliest.
